John Berger Quotes

127 quotes in 1842 categories

• It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
• Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
• Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
• One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
• The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
• We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
• A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to…
• A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work…
• As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct…
• I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both…
• Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you…
• Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected…
• The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its…
• Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through…
• Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one…
• Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
• Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion…
• Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is…
• All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings.…
• All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have…

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